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The analysis of the texts in the study seeks to prove the hypothesis that most of František Švantner´s short stories from the collection Malka (1942) belong to the genre of fantasy as it is defined by Tzvetan Todorov: the endings of most stories leave the reader oscillating between the natural and supernatural interpretations of the plot. The epistemological status of numerous events in the story is ambivalent. Švantner´s texts generate the fantasy effect by means of motif focalisation: each hypothetically supernatural motíf is focalised through a literary character´s perspective. The suyzhet must be reconstructed by a model reader in the text – this suyzhet is set in the crossing point of different characters´ (contradictory) dialogue perspectives. Another method of generating the fantasy effect is a blank space in the text, a missing story syntagm (a data concealing approach) and the inversion of time coordinates, when e.g. the emergence of a character who was already dead at that time (which the reader does not learn until the end) allows the „psychic“ interpretation, too. Emphasising the genre dimensions of Švantner´s texts may also fulfil an important role in the literary life when translating these texts into a foreign literature: hypothetically, they could be introduced into a new literary context as a sample of a particular genre rather than as a sample of Slovak literature.